There are plenty of reasons why so
many recent movies made about religion are studies in zealous extremism or, as we witnessed in the just-wrapped Sundance Film Festival, narratives about the ambivalent or
downright scary pull of charismatic believers, marginal practices, creepy cults. Lourdes, despite resolutely avoiding the track of vilifying faith, may seem in its
opening shot or in a roughly synopsized premise to be headed along the equally easy road of facetious send-up. Our first impression, from a camera somewhere in the high
rafters of a dubious, marble-floored hotel restaurant, is of timid, hunched, variously incapacitated pilgrims gradually entering and taking their seats, before the head
nun/chaperone runs dispassionately through the group itinerary for their visit to Lourdes, the legendary healing site. As the shot fills with people and the camera zooms
closer, the kitschiest accoutrements of this trip (an end-of-week prize for Best Pilgrim!) stand in uncertain relation to the soft, sympathetic sincerity with which this
nun, uncannily played by Elina Löwensohn, promises to her temporary wards a respite from their acute loneliness. The mutedness of the sound design, plus writer-director
Jessica Hausner's gift for capturing the hush and austerity even in commercialized spaces, lend the scene an unexpected dignity; the Crayola shades of the costumes and the
architectural pastiche of banquet hall and ski chalet encourage winking skepticism. The camera's refusal to cut, like the unfussy inscrutability of the performers, refuses
to break this inchoate first impression into more revealing tonal clues. Nothing contextualizes the overlaid rendition of "Ave Maria," which will reprise later in the film,
as a devout musical invocation or as a smirk at the commodified canning of spiritual expression. Is this pilgrimage for real or not, on the whole or in parts? And if so,
which parts?

The withholding of judgment persists across Lourdes, which is comic, haunting, sweet, pious, unsettling, agnostic, and wholly deadpan at various moments. The scene
structures, story arc, and style are so unusual that they ironically emit a strong sense of directorial point of view even as they inventively resist any sense of
pinpointable editorial intervention. Our focal character, played by the charming, heroically opaque Sylvie Testud, is a young, wheelchair-bound woman who, early on, comments
on the plastic, "touristy" aspects of this trip to Lourdes, where the minuscule possibility of a miracle is sold like a visit to Epcot Center, a Carnival Cruise, a steady
engine for gift-shop apparel: I Prayed To Be Able To Walk, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. But Testud's Christine makes this comment gently, in docile appreciation
of the chance to get out, and the framing of spaces as well as ensuing events conspire to imply that something miraculous is happening, almost happens, or at least potentially
could happen to Christine while at Lourdes. And why Christine? Löwensohn's chaperone, whether outraged at her unrewarded devotion or guilty about a private waver in her
faith, seems incensed that Christine, not she, is the object of divine contact. The indolent, boy-crazy escort played by Léa Seydoux and the more intensely afflicted visitor
played by Orsolya Tóth alternately stress the wry vulgarity and the humbling stakes of this place, this spell, whether of time or of magic.

Hausner, working in brilliantly cool cahoots with up-and-coming cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, keeps finding new locations, angles, and movements for her camera that
simultaneously imply the very apex of capitalist banalization and the lurking potential of Spirit, of something ineffable. Embracing neither belief nor renunciation, Lourdes
produces astonishing, dispassionate fusions of the two and an incredible range of gradations between them. What does it mean, either as the disabled pilgrim or the chaperoning
nun, to visit Lourdes and imagine, much less expect, a touch from God's finger? What does it mean to come to Lourdes and not entertain that possibility? Is it holy or
ridiculous, a joke or Very Much The Point, that the Spirit insinuates itself not in objects or intervals of sublime ecstasy but on drab day-trips, in restless queues,
between the trapezoidal cafeteria trays? What finally happens in Lourdes and the questions or answers that the movie thereby prompts are generously, uncynically open to
interpretation. But this is not a foggy, uncommitted exercise in run-of-the-mill ambiguity, nor does it turn on a brazen sensationalizing of body, society, and spirituality
in the manner of Breaking the Waves. The exquisite, oblique manipulation of images, sounds, rhythms, and performance by which Lourdes
evolves from scene to scene and by which it arrives at its finale offer its own grounds for an ardent belief in cinema—if not as a higher power then at least as a profound
one. Grade:B+

Given the difficulties of making a movie about spirituality or, frankly, about the kitschier effects of capitalist tourism, or of making a film about such a diffident
character, or getting a film to subsist so profoundly on impressions rather than action or dialogue, and without a firm resolution, Lourdes is a series of conceptual
challenges that pay off without seeming nearly as effortful as they might have.